SEO News

Posted by Dr-Pete

Last week, drowned out by the Panda 4.1 rollout, the 
MozCast Feature Graph detected a significant jump in the presence of answer boxes (+42% day-over-day, up to +44% on September 30th):

This measurement includes all types of “answer” boxes – direct answers, stock quotes, weather forecasts, box scores, and even the new, attributed answer boxes. Digging into the data, it appears that almost the entirety of the jump is in the new style of answer boxes. These are the answers that are extracted from 3rd-party websites, and they look something like this:

The key distinction is that you’ll see a search-result-style title and link below the answer. Separating just this data, the same two-week graph looks like this:

The day-over-day increase from September 25-26 in new answer boxes was +98%, almost doubling the total number in our data set. This clearly represents a significant expansion in Google’s ability to extract and display answers.

The “Winning” Queries

Over 100 queries picked up the new answer boxes in our data set. Below are 10 examples. Keep in mind that any given query may gain or lose its answer box for any given search, depending on factors such as search history, localization, and personalization:

1. global warming
2. mba
3. steampunk
4. dsl
5. triathlon
6. pollution
7. firewall
8. activex
9. vegan
10. project management

Many of these are general, informational answers, and quite a few of the new answer boxes in our data set seem to be coming directly from Wikipedia. With this update, Google also may have added a new capability – here’s the answer box for #3 above (“steampunk”):

The image on the right is being extracted directly from the article. While we’ve seen some examples of brand boxes with logos, the ability to directly add general images seems to be new. Other new answer boxes are more traditional, such as “mba”:

Many of these new queries seem to be broad, “head” queries, but that could be a result of our data set, which tends to be skewed toward shorter, commercial queries. One four-word query with a new answer box was “girl scout cookies types”:

It’s interesting to note that the more grammatically correct “girl scout cookie types” doesn’t seem to return an answer box. These new answers seem to be very dependent on query structure and how the query matches on-page keywords.

An Experiment in Answers

If Google is pulling more and more answers directly from the index (i.e. our sites), then it stands to reason we could update those answers. A couple of months ago, I noticed that one of my posts was producing an answer box for the search “how much does google make”:

Even as the author of this post, I had to admit that was a pretty terrible answer, especially being 3-4 years out of date. I quickly assembled a Twitter mob to deal with this problem (well, basically 
Ruth Burr Reedy and David Iwanow), and we unanimously decided something must be done:

I decided to edit the top of the post, adding a user-friendly update for new visitors that gave new numbers for 2013. This went up on July 10th – I posted the update on social, and by later that day the new page was cached.

Two weeks went by, and there was no change to the answer box. Naturally, I assumed this was because the old text was still in place (I had simply added new information). So, on July 24th, I carefully removed the old content (that appears in the answer box) and edited the META description. By the next day, the new page was cached and the new snippet was showing up in Google SERPs.

So, what does that answer box look like today, almost two months later? Look up four paragraphs, because it’s exactly the same. Even though the content used in this answer box is now completely gone, Google is still using it in search results.

While this is only one example, it seems to suggest that these answers are not being extracted and created in real-time – they’re being stored in some sort of internal Google knowledge base. This may sound familiar, if you’ve read anything over the last month about Google’s theoretical 
Knowledge Vault.

Unlike Freebase-based Knowledge panels and answers, this internal vault can’t be edited directly. Unlike organic results, where changes to our pages are generally reflected on the next crawl-and-cache, these answer boxes are being updated much less frequently. Since these new answers link directly to pages, they could be connecting to information that’s been mismatched for weeks or even months.

At this point, there’s very little anyone outside of Google can do but keep their eyes open. If this is truly the Knowledge Vault in action, it’s going to grow, impacting more queries and potentially drawing more traffic away from sites. At the same time, Google may be becoming more possessive of that information, and will probably try to remove any kind of direct, third-party editing (which is possible, if difficult, with the current Knowledge Graph).

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What is Google aiming to achieve with Panda 4.1?

Google’s Panda updates are always aiming for quality enhancement of the search engine results.

The first Panda update was known as the content farm update, because it was mainly directed against thin content that was placed on large scale platforms such as ehow or ezinearticles.com.

Panda 4.0 was a major rework of the whole Panda implementation in the algorithm. So Panda 4.1 is just the continuation of what Google did with 4.0.

Where are you seeing the biggest changes so far?

You can see that a Panda update was rolled out just on our list of winners and losers. There is always a pattern on the sites on these lists.

Panda updates are query based. That means that the impact is not on all queries, only a specific set of queries and that’s why you can find a pattern. The changes we saw this time are again directed against a lot of thin content and aggregator sites.

Sites like FindTheBest, Pearltrees or Socialcomments.org aggregate content and present it in a nice, easy-to-consume way.

But they are aggregators which means no unique content and it’s also aggregated like a search engine. And Google doesn’t want search-in-search to rank highly.

Based on what you have seen so far, has Panda 4.1 achieved what Google wanted?

This is a question that only Google can answer. Google is never finished.

Every new iteration of Panda or other updates will increase the quality. But with all the redundancy in the World Wide Web, Google has a lot to do to filter out the noise and increase the relevancy of the results step by step.

What kinds of signals does Google look for to determine low-quality, thin content sites and pages?

There are two different kind of signals. Quantitative signals are based on content and site structure. Qualitative signals are based on user behavior.

For the quantitive signals it is Google’s mission to find sites with unique and rich content. Content with an added value for the user. And with all the data that Google has, it is the next step to take the user signals and weight the results against a group of other results.

Results with worse than average user behavior are sites with a bad user experience. Google is using both signals to determine which results are relevant for the user based on their query.

When a site has too many ‘bad’ signals, the whole site can be dropped out of the rankings. Panda is not just based on some keywords on a website. It always hits a huge part of the page, that’s why Panda is a serious issue. 

What is your advice for sites hit by Panda?

Housekeeping! Many sites just have too much thin content. They have to add value to these pages, find redundant pages and merge them or just delete them if it’s old outdated content.

But importantly, if you don’t do anything it will get worse. These pages that just keep their thin content will have the so called slow-death phenomenon.

They gradually lose visibility over time until nothing is left. That’s why companies should build a Panda proof site before they are affected.

What do you think Google will be looking to deal with in the next update?

Google always wants to improve and to deliver the right result for the right time in the right context.

There will be many more updates where content relevancy will be the key.